Singing the Body of God

Abstract

Abstract This is the first full‐length study of the devotional poetry and poetics of the fourteenth‐century poet–philosopher Vedåntadeóika, one of the most outstanding and influential figures in the Hindu tradition of àrâ‐Vaióïavism (the cult of Lord Vishnu and his consort Lakómâ or àrâ), a tradition that affirms both vernacular Tamil poems of ninth‐ and tenth‐century saint‐poets (the Çôvårs) and the Sanskrit Vedas as an Ubhaya or “dual” Vedånta. Long after his death, Vedåntadeóika was claimed as the founding Çcårya (sectarian preceptor) of the Vaìakalai or “Northern School” of àrâvaióïavism, associated with the holy city of Kåñcâpuram. Singing the Body of God is a comparative study of the Sanskrit, Prakãit, and Tamil poems composed by Vedåntadeóika in praise of important Vaióïava shrines and their icons – poems that are considered to be the apogee of South Indian devotional literature. This book examines the varied ways in which Vedåntadeóika, the philosopher and logician, works his thought through the distinctive – at times antithetical – medium of the poem. It also gives particular attention to the poems’ emotional and visionary center of gravity: the different temple images of Lord Vishnu, referred to by the poet simply as the various “lovely bodies” of God. Singing the Body of God brings to light a unique example of the creative synthesis of the Sanskrit and Tamil traditions in Medieval Tamil Nadu, and makes an important contribution to our understanding of intellectual and religious vernacularism and “cosmopolitanism” in pre‐modern South Asia.